Sailing Compass
No one cares, other than me, but whatever. This is a sailing compass, for use with GURPS Vehicles Expansion 2 sailing ships and MapTools. It shows the wind angles for various types of sail. Create a token for the sailing compass in MapTools. Draw a line from the ship's token in the desired direction of travel. Using the free wheel (shift + rotate) to point the light blue arrow on the sailing compass token in the direction of the wind, and then move the sailing compass token so the center is on the line of the ship's travel. Determine which colored bar (red*, orange, chartreuse, green, or blue) covers the ship's direction of travel. Cross reference the color bar with the sail type to determine the percentage of the ship's nominal speed that it is actually making. Use the bright red bar for bermuda, gaff and jib, or junk rigs. Use the maroon red bar for lateen sails, and the dark red bar for full rigs. The orange bar starts where the appropriate red bar ends, so bermuda rigs have large orange bars and full rigs have small ones. Square rigs should treat the orange and red bars as red. Catamarans, trimarans, and spinnaker full rigs run at 90% with the wind astern. Single masted square rigs run at 100% with the wind astern. Examples: 4 ships are racing. Each has two masts and 1800 sqft of sail. One is square-rigged with simple squares, one is fore-and-aft rigged with lateen sails, one is fore-and-aft rigged with gaff-and-jibs, and one is fully rigged. They can make 8, 7.7, 8, and 8.7 mph, respectively, under current wind conditions. The wind is blowing due east. On the first leg of the race, they have to travel for 2 miles at 250 degrees. This is in the red zone for all of them, so they are tacking at 2%, 11%, 13%, and 6% of their maximum speed: 0.02, 0.85, 1, and 0.52 mph, respectively. Then they have to travel 2 miles at 300 degrees. The gaff-and-jib is now in the orange zone, wind on the bow, and moves at 33% of maximum, or 2.64. The third leg is 2 miles at 200, putting everything but the square rig shipped on the bow and giving the respective speeds of 0.02, 2.08, 2.64, and 1.31. The fourth leg is 2 miles due north, so the wind is on everyone's beam, and respective speeds are 4, 6.93, 7.2, and 6.96. The fifth leg is is 50 miles SE, with the wind on everyone's quarter, and all ships reach their nominal speeds. Finally, the sixth leg is 10 miles due E, and with the wind astern, each ship is running at 80% of maximum and speeds of 6.4, 6.16, 6.4, and 6.96, respectively. Total time for each ship works out to 383, 14.09, 11.53, and 16.67 hours, respectively, with average speeds of 0.18, 4.83, 5.9, and 4.08 mph. If the first three segments are removed, the fore-and-aft rigs are less advantaged and times drop to 8.31, 8.41, 8.09, and 7.47 hours, respectively, with speed of 7.46, 7.38, 7.66, and 8.3 mph. Category:GM Miscellaneous